Storage Field Day 7

Maxta was the last presenter at Storage Field Day 7 and spoke about their hyper-convergence product. Hyper-Convergence… what’s that all about again? Simplicity mostly: combine your compute and storage in one single unit and manage it in a single integrated user interface. Maxta offers their product in two form factors: the software-only MxSP package, or the MaxDeploy appliance which is hardware and software combined and preconfigured. Maxta also adds three additional key values to hyper-convergence: Choice, Scalability and Cost. The former two usually don’t spring to mind when you hear about hyper-convergence products: the simplicity you seek comes with a trade-off. Let’s dive in!

The Connected Data / File Transporter presentation kicked off with a rather interesting look at the cloud computing market of today, more specifically the economics of public cloud and the other drawbacks it has. Many of us have seen “the cloud” grow over the past years and still, the marketing behind it is aggressive. Most industry events are still fully focused on “moving to the cloud”: EMC World 2015 was all about the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and how to move to it, companies I talk with still “want to move to the public cloud because unicorns” and if you open a random IT magazine you’ll see clouds every other pageparagraph line.

Something I noticed the past couple of years is the big difference between the adoption of public cloud in the US versus Europe: I feel that the US is more eager to jump into a cloud than us Europeans. Sure, people use cloud services over here as well: I use Dropbox privately to share some files with friends and I also store some (garbage) emails at Gmail. Talk with a relatively small company and there’s a big chance they use some type of cloud service like Office365, just because the TCO of running that infrastructure for themselves doesn’t add up. But have that same conversation with a larger company and it’s a different story.

Exablox presented their OneBlox scale-out NAS system for small and mid-sized organizations at Storage Field Day 7. A typical customer might start with a moderate amount of data that doesn’t have too stringent performance requirements. In the next few years the customer performance requirements might double and the capacity requirements quadruple. Instead of having to buy a traditional array that would have to be sized for that 4x end-state performance and later adding extra disks for capacity, most customers would prefer to invest in small chunks and grow their system as and when it needs to. Lets see how Exablox’ OneBlox system will do this…

The very first presentation at Storage Field Day 7 was held by Catalogic about their ECX copy data management platform that allows you to manage, orchestrate and analyze your different copies of data. Catalogic claims that you can save up to 39% on costs by reducing the amount of redundant copies of data in your IT infrastructure, while simultaneously also making sure your data is no longer at risk of being under protected. Let’s see how they do that…

We’ve made it! After a rude alarm clock that woke me up at 3AM CEST back in the Netherlands I started the 2 hour drive to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. Along the way I picked up Arjan Timmerman whom I met last year at Storage Field Day 6 and together we traveled from AMS to LHR in London. There we met up with Enrico Signoretti (also a familiar face from SFD6) and with the three of us we boarded the 747 to SFO. The Storage Field Day 7 adventure was about to begin!